Our Wheels are Turning

Over the past week or two, Kile and I have been racking our brains on how we can speed up our process of saving enough money to pay off some debts and increase our savings accounts so we can get the heck outta here for a while. This past week has been pretty rough for this country; the multiple shootings across the nation (2 of which were here in the Pacific Northwest) have made our stomachs hurt. Seeing these horrific acts on the news made me think of the Anthony Bourdain episode when he’s in Mexico City speaking with one of the locals there. They were talking about the murder rate in Mexico and the local said something that struck me pretty hard. He said that many of the murders in Mexico are drug-related; he then said that he, himself, was never “scared” of being a victim because it’s easy to stay out of…don’t get involved in the drug industry. His last comment on this topic was that he would never ever live in America because here…we kill each other for no reason at all. Hearing this point of view was heartbreaking and also terrifying.

I certainly don’t want to come off sounding naive in thinking that if/when we start our travels and exploration that we’d be leaving “all that is evil”. We’re very well aware that bad things can and do happen everywhere. However, for us, it’s more of an overall collective culture and attitude that we’re searching for; a place that truly values life, love and family. A place that isn’t obsessed with social media or idolizing “celebrities” for no real reason all. A place that isn’t all about huge corporations who own many other businesses that you once thought were independent or local. A place where people aren’t killing each other because they were feeling neglected by the opposite sex. Who knows! Maybe we are naive in a way but, for us, there’s only one way to find out and that’s to find out for ourselves.

End rant.

Anyway, that’s what’s been on my brain the past few days. Back to our plan. We’ve started looking around at smaller apartments around the city and decided we’re going to wait until fall to make the move. We have a road trip coming up at the end of August, along with many other fun summer activities that we want to enjoy without the stress of moving. Not to mention, it seems like everyone and their mom tends to move during the summer so we may have a better shot of finding our ideal spot when things have settled down in the fall. Until then, we’ve decided to cut down our personal spending by $100 each a pay period. That will provide us with an extra $400 a month to throw towards the evil that is Sallie Mae or put in our savings account.

We’ve also had a really great time swooning over opportunities across the world for caretakers or housesitters. We recently subscribed to a newsletter called The Caretake Gazette and it’s AMAZING. It’s not free, so you do have to subscribe but the opportunities are endless. Anything from watching over a ranch for months at a time in Montana or helping start a B&B in Brazil. Just knowing that there are experiences out there like this make us extremely excited for what our future might hold.

So far we have a theoretical year and a half plan in place. In a dream world, we’re hoping that in a year and half from now we’ll have significantly less debt and a nice little nest egg to go and explore for about 3 months. We figure our first endeavor could be more of a “test run” to see if it’s A) something we actually enjoy doing and B) if we could afford it and make it all work. And if worse comes to worst…we come home, find jobs and start over with a new plan.